The Quest for the Fabled Lost Source of the Pork Scratching

So here we are: standing in the very place Peregrination Shoppingtrolley first stood almost two centuries ago when he discovered the fabled lost source of the pork scratching. For Shoppingtrolley, it has been a long and dangerous quest staggering from one pub to the next, struggling along side roads and canal towpaths with members of the exploration team often falling out of the pubs, missing the towpath completely and ending up in the canal or walking into bridges. Through such hazards, accidents and mishaps Shoppingtrolley lost several members of his team along the way.

Shoppingtrolley, a very experienced explorer, had long intended to set out on an expedition far into the deep heart of the mysterious Black Country with its strange network of canals, pubs and hot pork sandwich shops. It was a place where seemingly every third building along each of its narrow meandering streets was a pub. This fact alone was enough to inspire many previous explorers to visit the place, especially those noted for their thirst. But to Shoppingtrolley, it was the great mystery of the pork scratching that had beguiled him from an early age.

Many wise and ancient civilisations – quite naturally – worship the bacon sandwich as the true food of the Gods, but deep in the darkest heart of the mysterious Black County, so Shoppingtrolley had heard, was a tribe that worshipped not the bacon sandwich, not even the hot pork sandwich but another pork product instead.

Something, Shoppingtrolley, reasoned had taken this tribe from the way of the bacon into previously uncharted religious rituals and he vowed he would be the one that discovered the secret.

Eventually, though, just Shoppingtrolley, Spleen Humpbacked-Bridge and Fop Hesitation, the only surviving members of that ill-fated expedition made it to the lost city of Tipton and the fearsome Black Country tribe that held the secret of the pork scratching, hidden inside those forbidding temple factories that seemed to ooze the smell of cooking pork over the weary, but beguiled, explorers who could hardly allow themselves to believe their ordeal was finally over.

Unfortunately for the explorers, though, the secret of how the pork scratching is made is a very closely guarded secret. So when they managed to arrange an audience for themselves with the High Priest of the Holy Pig, to ask if they could witness how this most holy foodstuff is made, the High Priest of the Holy Pig could only answer as he, and all the previous holders of that post back through the mists of time back to he very dawn of the ancient Black Country civilisation, always have done.

‘Fuck off!’ he said.

The First 'Tales of the Unexpurgated' book is available here for the Kindle.